documenting trauma : comics and the politics of memory

Beginning with a talk from comics artist Nicola Streeten, and concluding with a keynote from Professor Hillary Chute, this symposium will seek to address the following questions : why have so many comics and other graphic narratives, the production and publication of which has exploded in recent years, been framed as memoirs or non-fictional documentaries of traumatic events ? Is there a relationship between the comics form, as distinct from film and written narrative through its inclusion of multiple visual panels, and the remembrance and recovery of trauma ? How do the interpretive demands made by these disjointed formal attributes impinge on readers of comics and shape their relationship to historical traumatic events ?
Thursday 22nd June 2017